


Warm Places

by Acai



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, It's okay though, M/M, Nyctophobia, gregg is there to give him a hug, sad angus : (
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 17:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10391961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: Gregg is a lot more than just love.- - -Sometimes everything is not okay.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It's late and I'm procrastinating : (  
> This is just a silly vent vent vent fic to try and clear some thoughts and fears, lmao

>    _Prompt from nekomahc on tumblr. Thank you for your suggestion. Prompts and headcanons can be sent to aobajosighs (for writing prompts) or aobasketches (for art prompts) on tumblr._

          His mother said she loved his father. They said it when they hung up their phones, they said it sometimes when they parted for the day. He’d never heard his father say that he loved his mother, but Angus supposed he must have. Angus watched their love, studied it from afar and listened to it in the dark. He thought, sometimes, that he liked the storybook version a little better. His parents loved each other, but they never touched. They yelled and hit each other when they got mad. They fought over everything, and cried in the dark when the other had left. They broke glass and stepped in it until their feet were scarred and their cupboards were empty. But that was their love, and Angus didn’t want anything to do with it.

They said, sometimes, that they loved him. When he did something to make them look good—which wasn’t often, he wasn’t good at much—they would say it. When his mother felt particularly bad for some reason, the days when he couldn’t go to school for days, she would say it sometimes, as if that could make up for it.

Angus wished that it wouldn’t make up for it. He wished he wouldn’t just forgive her every time that she said it. He did. Maybe that’s why she did it.

That was it. That was how it worked. It was love, he guessed. Love was yelling and breaking glass and hitting and fearing. It hurt. He hated it. Angus hated their love, hated it in general. He wanted, sometimes, to sneak out one of the windows and disappear to wherever there was to disappear to. Somewhere far away where there wasn’t any any glass and there wasn’t any love and there wasn’t any yelling.

He liked to imagine that place when he wanted to go away. When he was locked in the dark or when he had blood coming out of his armheadlegsfeethands, he would squeeze his eyes shut and come up with a place that he’d like to be. The buildings would be tall, the people would be nice. Nobody would yell and locks wouldn’t come with the doors, so there would always be a way to get out. Windows and doors and places to hide where nobody could find him. Angus would picture a warm place. The sun was always out, and it was never dark. It was warm and bright and kind, and nothing ever hurt.

And then he would open his eyes and there would just be darkness, and Angus would remember that his arm was throbbing and bruised, that his hands were bleeding, and that his stomach was growling. Four years felt like forever, and four years seemed impossibly faraway. There would never be kind people, there would always be the night.

And sometimes Angus didn’t want to do it.

He didn’t want to die, he didn’t want to be gone. Angus wanted to wake up and be somewhere happy, wanted to forget that he ever lived in that house in Possum Springs, wanted to forget that the sun ever set.

When the pain was too strong to close his eyes and imagine himself away, Angus tried other things. He tried to open the door with his mind, tried to call to the neighbors. He tried willing them to come and help him and take him someplace warmer, someplace better. Anywhere else. The door didn’t open until midnight, and even then it was just his mother scowling down at him until he picked himself up and scrambled upstairs.

She locked him back in there the next day, slammed the door and let all the food crash down until he bit his lip and curled in on himself to stop from making any noise. He waited, and waited, and waited. It always felt like an eternity in there, but he’d become very familiar with the time of an hour. He waited an hour, and another hour, and another, until there wasn’t any sunlight filtering in through the bottom of the pantry door anymore and he could hear crickets and police sirens somewhere outside. He waited longer, longer, and longer, until the sun had rose again and the door opened and closed twice and he was there by himself in the pantry.

And Angus felt the panic crawling up into his throat at the thought.

Had she _forgotten_ him? She’d never _left_ him in there for more than a couple of hours. How long would he stay there? How long would he sit in there with the fear crawling up his throat and the anxiety punching holes in his stomach? Would he just have to stay there forever? Would he die in there, like that?

Angus sat and fretted and panicked some more, until the door had opened and closed twice more and the sunlight was starting to grow dark again.

And then he left. He didn’t leave the closet, because he was still sitting there and trying to remember how to breathe, but he left his own head. He went to nowhere and everywhere except for there in that pantry, letting himself disappear from his own head and his own body.

When he returned, briefly, it was to the sound of glass shattering. A shard of it slid under the pantry door, and Angus picked it up and felt it until he went away again.

It was night again when the door opened. The days in the pantry ticked by in moments when he was gone.

So Angus started to leave whenever he could.

He would leave his head when he bled on the floor, he would leave his head when he heard them yelling downstairs, and he would leave his head the moment he felt a hand first shove him against a wall. And bad things stopped happening. Angus would return to his mind and his body and he would feel sore, he would feel the bruises on his arms and chest for days after, but he wasn’t ever there to feel it as it happened. The pantry door would shut and he would leave until it opened again.

It was like sleeping. It was like fast-forwarding through the bad parts of the movie.

And it was alright with Angus.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It happened, sometimes, when bad things weren’t happening. It would happen during lunch, and he would come back when the bell rang and jolted him out of it, and he would find Bea sitting in front of him instead of next to him, as if she were providing at least a little shelter from the noise and aggression of freshman year.

It happened in class, and he’d have to get the notes from the teacher’s blog because he hadn’t been listening.

It happened while he walked home, and he wouldn’t even realize he was home until he was unlocking the door and swinging it open.

Angus was a million years away, but he didn’t really want to come back

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Angus hated love. He hated how it hurt. He hated how it made him bleed. He hated how everybody cried because of it. He hated how it sent him a million years away. He hated how his skin crawled because of it.

Angus didn’t know himself. He knew that he was Angus, he knew his address and his phone number and his school I.D., but he didn’t know _Angus._ He would remember things, but they wouldn’t feel like his own memories. He would look back on his past self and wouldn’t recognize the person there. If he wasn’t Angus, though, then he wasn’t really anybody at all.

And that was terrifying.

He didn’t want love. He didn’t want Angus. He didn’t want anything but that bright, warm place.

But he didn’t think it even existed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Gregg wasn’t love.

Not at first.

At first he was a nuisance.  Then he was tolerable. And then he was a friend.

He was happy most days, sad the others, and somewhere in-between sometimes. He moved all of the time and drank coffee to calm himself down, but he was a good person. He was loud, but he was good.

He was terrifying at first.

He was loud enough to send Angus into a haze, and violent enough to make Angus want to scramble for home, but he was _good_ enough to learn to be quieter, at least around Angus, and keep his violent to Mae and Casey, who were equally loud and violent.

And, Angus supposed, that was why he never really looked at it as love. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t send him a million miles away, and he never cried over them. So it wasn’t love, then, because it was kind.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Gregg turned into love when he was a warm place.

Gregg turned into love when he was air, because Angus hadn’t taken a breath in years.

Gregg turned into love when he was solace and quiet, because Angus hadn’t slept before a night in his life.

And Gregg was love when Angus hurt when Gregg was sad, and when Angus cried when Gregg felt like his warm place, and because Angus felt like his skin was hot with a fresh bruise when his hand was in Gregg’s.

Angus didn’t want anything to do with love, but he got it anyway.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He wasn’t there.

He wasn’t in the apartment, it didn’t smell like vanilla anymore.

He wasn’t in their apartment, and Gregg wasn’t there because Angus wasn’t there either.

Angus was off in a place from a long time ago where his body ached and he felt tired and he suffocated all the time. Where hands crawled up him where they weren’t welcome, and the thought of it all made Angus sick.

He wasn’t there, but he wasn’t anywhere. It was faintly off somewhere—he could smell the cigarette smoke and he could hear the TV static and his mother crying in the living room, could feel the hard wood beneath him and could sense his lungs tightening when he forgot how to breath. But he wasn’t there. Angus wasn’t anywhere.

His head was just floating and he felt sick.

And then Angus smelled vanilla, and he felt softness and heard the radio in a kitchen a few rooms over. He wretched again, dry heaving until his eyes were watery and he could barely breathe, until he panted and hunched over and chased the memories out of his head.

Gregg looked worried.

Angus hated when Gregg looked worried.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They talked about it all sometimes. They talked about sheep and pantries and wanting to get out and go somewhere a million miles away. They talked about aching and longing and feeling and breathing and living and dying and being.

But they didn’t ever talk about the hands that crawled to places where they weren’t welcome, and they never talked about the heavy feeling of a palm against his hip, too close, too close, too close for comfort. They never talked about feeling sick until they couldn’t breathe at memories of violence, and never talked about staying awake at night and hating the things that they couldn’t change about themselves.

It wasn’t really _okay,_ but it was good. It wasn’t ideal, but it was warm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It wouldn’t ever go away. Angus would always feel bruises and fear darkness and hate hunger and feel palms pressed into his hips.

It wouldn’t ever go away. Gregg would always hate blood and dislike pets and stay up at night wanting to change himself.

It was warm, though, and it smelled like vanilla, and they were okay.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Gregg put up lights in their room. He didn’t say anything, so Angus never commented either, but he put lights up in their room. They left the lights on at night and kept the door cracked open so that the light from their kitchen would stream in, too, and when Angus felt pressure build up he would just open his eyes to find the lights and feel his boyfriend curled into his side to remind himself that he was _here_ and not _there._

Angus listened until Gregg fell asleep. He liked the quiet and the peacefulness of the feeling of falling asleep, anyway. He would wait until he knew Gregg was sleeping, and if his breathing never evened out then they would stay up together and Angus would tell him things that he’d learned that day or they’d talk about games that Gregg had played until he did fall asleep, and it wasn’t much, but it meant that Gregg wasn’t ever by himself with his nasty thoughts.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~

The sun went down sometimes, but they had Christmas lights in their room. It got dark sometimes, but it never got cold. Their doors didn’t shut, didn’t have locks, and their apartment always smelled good, like vanilla. It was warm and it was bright, and it was good.

Gregg was good. Life was bad. Things were okay, Angus supposed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this! If you liked it, go ahead and leave a comment below telling me what you thought! As always, feel free to message me at aobajosighs on tumblr if you'd like to talk about this fic, or night in the woods in general! I'm always up for making some new connections. Thank you again, I'd love to hear your thoughts.


End file.
